Cheese

Cheese is a good word. It makes you smile, literally, to say cheese. Plus, cheese is tasty. If you can't tell, my week has been pretty boring. Nothing really spurred me to write anything in my 'blog this week, so I will expound on the minor fixation I had earlier today.

People brought in snacks for the project I'm working on right now (kind of as reward for coming in on the weekend - I'd rather they just give me the money), and someone was inventive enough to buy individually wrapped string cheese!

I don't eat cheese by itself very often, but string cheese really is a very enticing snack. As I was eating it, however, I began to puzzle how string cheese was actually made. Cheese isn't exactly like a plant or a tree or a muscle, which often grow with fibers aligned one way. And yet, that is precisely the analogy that first popped to mind (perhaps because another snack which I was "enjoying" was beef jerky). I began to wonder whether string cheese was cultivated with some weird bacteria, or whether the milk was placed in a strange matrix that would encourage the proteins to form into strands.

Boy, I was way off base. Apparently string cheese forms strings because the curds are pulled during processing (think pulled noodles) and then pressed together while aligned together. See, if one is curious, one learns something new every day! I learn new information about things as familiar as the string cheese I ate as a child (and apparently still eat as an adult).

Say CHEESE!